


Body and Soul

by Tammany



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angelic Aesthetics, Body Worship, Love, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-19
Updated: 2019-07-19
Packaged: 2020-07-08 11:49:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19869169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: Angels and demons are not naturally at ease with bodies, and seldom see them as being compatible with soul: it's a failing of Heaven and Hell, and one way that the servant spirits both fail to understand God's ineffable will.This is a study of the angel and the demon "gone native," and learning to love the sacred intersection of spirit and flesh.





	Body and Soul

There is an eroticism to human bodies that rattles Heaven and Hell. Thus their obsessive fixation on the sexual and sensual: God Herself is not so fretful, but the lesser spirits might as well be tetched in the head about it all. Their natures are non-corporeal, and all that messy, mucky, groping, intrusive, taste-touch-smell (Oh, please, not the smells!) involvement is disturbing. The physicality of it all dismays them.

The angels try to be perfect. You can see it in them: slim and fair, good teeth, good hair. Nice clothes. Good eyes. You don’t see many angels whose faces are full of “character,” or whose bodies sag and droop. Demons, conversely, wear nightmare bodies a lot of the time—bodies further warped by their damnation, with tiny, bestial attributes they can’t set aside. It is part of the Fall, an element of their punishment, and from their perspective human variability whispers, maliciously, of the demon’s own deformities.

It is part of what sets Aziraphale apart from his fellows. He dares to hope the same of Crowley.

Angels—and demons—tend to see spirits as ideally specific, bodies as ideally generic. For the angels it is a matter of principle: the spirit over all. For demons it can become aspirational—to regain the specific, unique innocence they possessed before the fall, and the unblemished bodies that went with that ingénue status.

Aziraphale has come to see both spirits and bodies as equally unique, and equally generic. What was that line from Shakespeare? One of the funny ones Crowley loved? “Two eyes, indifferent blue?” No. No, quite wrong. “Two lips, indifferent red,” Twelfth Night. “Item: two lips, indifferent red; item: two grey eyes, with lids to them…”Olivia, unimpressed with her beauty, or with Orsino’s eternal praise. It was in the eyes of the creator, and of the lover, that bodies and spirits became simultaneously beautiful and distinct. Outside that magical gaze, the individual resolved as a mass of scars and deformities, dragging spirit and body away from the unblemished ideal.

He loved Crowley’s nose. It was arched, an eagle’s beak, the tip too sharp and over-sculpted. It reminded him in the oddest ways of Crowley’s wit—also sharp and ever so firmly bent. He loved his mouth—thin lips with a built-in pout, framed by sharp brackets.

It was thousands of years before he came to love Crowley’s eyes. Along the way he first pitied the demon his deformity, then felt a longing to heal it. Then, as he became accustomed, he hungered to convince the demon to set aside the never-ending array of glasses he wore to hide them, convincing himself that he just wanted the demon to feel safe and at ease. He didn’t realize he had come to love Crowley’s eyes just as they were until—when? After the bombing of the church in the Blitz, though that was the start of it. No…No. He knew. It was in the final years, the run-up to the Apocalypse, the years of fear, as he realized that if, as he believed with all his heart, Heaven won—

Then Heaven would kill his demon. Destroy him. He would dissolve from existence in gouts of holy fire, floods of holy water, lanced through with holy light—gone. Or, worse, if those horrible human prophecies were as accurate as Agnes Nutter's, he would be cast back into the pit and suffer for eternity without even the hope of a lunch at the Ritz to ease the agony.

The realization crashed down on him one day as he and “Nanny Ashtereth” stood together in the garden of the American Ambassador’s residence. Crowley said something. Aziraphale could never again recall what, because the demon lifted her head, laughing, and the angle of her face allowed him a glimpse of golden eyes flashing in a cascade of sunlight. Those eyes seemed so foreign in Crowley’s face, against sallow skin and rust and coal hair. But they were Crowley—him, and no one else in all the universe. The thought electrified him, and he found himself matching it with the blazing aura of the demon’s spirit-self, shot through with sulfur and electric lightning bolts and pain. In that moment he loved Crowley’s animal eyes—his demon mark—with a surge of love as deep as the love that had stricken him in the bombed nave of the church. Only his costume as Brother Francis had spared his feelings from being revealed: who can see love in the arched overbite and shaggy brows and fool’s smock and donkey-hat of Brother Francis?

Now he was stricken with love for every detail that made Crowley Crowley. The high forehead, wrinkled as much with stress as putative age. The lean cheeks and high cheekbones, like a greyhound. The lanky, long-limbed build, again like a greyhound, hollowed and bony and graceful and dramatic. He loved Crowley for the sudden look of stunned innocence betrayed that could appear like magic on that otherwise worldly, cynical face.

He could look back in time and see Crowley’s horror at the realization that God would kill children in the Flood.

“Even kids?!”

The demon was like a three-year-old who’s been told Mummy and Daddy intend to kill the family dog…the stunned betrayal as deep as Aziraphale himself felt.

He loved spidery fingers, long and knuckled. He loved slim feet, so much longer than his own duck-foot wedge. He loved hair in a thousand styles, begging him to touch, fondle, braid. He loved a body in constant motion, strung tight with nervous energy, seeming in motion even when slouched lazily on a park bench—quite likely to sit up straight, or reverse the cross of his legs with an impatient toss, shins cutting the air so fast it should make scissors noises. Fwwwwipt! He loved the trim figure that could dance down a church nave, combining dapper elegance and comic vulnerability—king and jackass in a single body in motion.

He loved the very specific body of Crowley, just as he loved the spirit. If he could choose but one, he’d take immortal spirit. But even then, he knew he’d take a picture and hide it in the most precious of his books, to study with love in all eternity to come.

What he did not know for the longest time was the love that lit Crowley’s serpentine eyes, and softened the harsh mouth into a doting smile, and warmed a hard spirit into melting love. He didn’t know Crowley saw a laughable paradox—prim and trim angel coupled with soft and dumpy man. Saintly virtue giving way to the temptation of a plate of coquilles St. Jacques, rich with Mornay sauce, begging to be savored. He didn’t know that century by century two serpent eyes had come to search, constantly, for the shield-shaped face of an angel’s earthly body.

He didn’t know his demon had seen him dance, in that select little men’s club a century ago—and that his heart had filled with both laughter and adoration at the slightly soft, gently pudgy form moving in agile patterns through the formal dance.

He didn’t know that his demon loved the wild, untamable curl of his hair—or the way humidity could turn tousled waves into outright loops. He didn’t know that his demon had come to long for a particular curve to a particular bum, or the gentle surprise in angel eyes, or the bounce in Aziraphale’s step when they walked out together.

Even after the failure of the Apocalapse, when he was assured in his heart that somehow he and Crowley were together, and in love, he didn’t know his demon had developed the same adoration for the point where holy spirit met worldly flesh. Nor did he know he and his demon both shivered in fear that someday they would be seen to hunger, for body and for soul.

What would the other think? Would that lust end everything?

The first time they kissed, lip met lip. The second time, breath met breath. The third time, though, body and soul caught fire.

“Your mouth,” Crowley gasped, tracing the tender bow of Aziraphale’s mouth. “I love your mouth.”

“God help me—the curve of your spine…” Aziraphale melted, hands tracing the complex arcs of bum and waist and backbone, leading up a long, long body to shoulders and neck and head. “Your body is a garden, an Eden. It fills my heart.”

“Aww—you softy, you,” Crowley said, but his voice dripped love, and he spent the next half-hour kissing the curved shell of Aziraphale’s ear.

It was all beautiful. Backs and bums and wrinkles and bellies and eyes and jowls and even, as Sister Mary Loquacious had once said, the lovely little toesie-wosies. Cocks and balls and arseholes, mouths and fingers and tongues and all the very, very physical things they could do with them. As for climax, when both spirit and body lit up like fireworks, and reflected their light in the mirrored surface of eternity? Oh...oh!

Aziraphale and Crowley were left unsure of anything, except that as both angel and demon they defied the assumptions of their kind—and only the fact that God had seen both body and spirit as worthy of her genius gave them hope that their obsessive desire might be right. That maybe they had a clue after all.

In any case, Aziraphale thought one sacred morning after a night before that had blended body and mind in perfect, unique specificity, he loved Crowley, mind and body and soul. And perhaps, most of all, he loved his eagle’s nose…upon which he left a kiss, before rising to make the morning’s first pot of tea.


End file.
